Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Cheers!

First of all, I want to thank all the developers of Dolphin and all the people that contributed to this project over the years. This is my favourite emulator by far and one piece of software that brought a lot of joy to my life over the years. It really is an impressive feat, what this community has been able to do.

Now, I want to talk about something I've been wondering for some time now.

I've been following this project for quite some time now, and as far as I know (by reading the dev reports) the biggest problem that this emulator always had over the years was the stuttering related to the shaders. That was solved some time ago, with the development of the "Ubershaders". From reading the dev reports, that was considered at the time the biggest breakthrough/milestone of the last years for this project.

That being said, are there any major improvements to be made for this emulator or is it now just a case of fine tuning what we already have? I'm ignoring all the android porting, since I use the pc for the majority of my emulation.

Looking at the compatibility list I can see that almost 35% of the games are perfectly playable, which is awesome. But on the other hand almost 60% are considered playable. Why is that so? What prevents those games from becoming "perfect"? Is it possible that they will never be perfect? Is that an emulator problem or is that exclusively related to those games, since the core emulator is as good as it can ever be?

What is the road ahead related to compatibility? Are there any major breakthroughs in the horizon? Or should we expect just small improvements since the core emulator is as good as it will ever be?

I'm curious, I don't understand a lot about the technical aspect of emulation, so I really would appreciate any thoughts about this, from the developers and the general community.

Thanks for the great project and keep up the good work

From my understanding, the reason why a lot of games are marked as just 'playable' is because of some bug/graphical defect that requires tweaking some settings to fix, and is not game-breaking. Other games used the respective consoles hardware to their fullest potential, using all sorts of tricks, making them harder to emulate. As for major breakthroughs, I honestly have no idea, and I suspect it's mainly refinement of what's already here, weeding out regressions and bugs, and little-by-little finding more efficient and accurate methods of emulating. But those are just my thoughts.

(08-15-2020, 09:21 AM)rubens70 Wrote: [ -> ]Looking at the compatibility list I can see that almost 35% of the games are perfectly playable, which is awesome. But on the other hand almost 60% are considered playable. Why is that so? What prevents those games from becoming "perfect"? Is it possible that they will never be perfect? Is that an emulator problem or is that exclusively related to those games, since the core emulator is as good as it can ever be?

About the ratings system, it's... complicated. The way it's currently established made a ton of sense for the earlier days of Dolphin, which was riddled with emulation hacks, unimplemented features and so own. Dolphin has tremendously improved since then, but the old rating system didn't.

In short, under the current rating guidelines (which comes mostly from the wiki), a game can only be considered "Perfect" if it can be accurately emulated from start to finish on Dolphin, out of the box, and there's absolutely no known issues, otherwise it can't have a perfect rating and will instead have a playable rating, no matter how minor the issue is. I would say at least half of the games marked as "playable" (if not more) could be considered as "perfect" if you disregarded those minor inaccuracies that prevents them to have a proper "perfect" rating under current guidelines.

Along the years we attempted to rework the rating systems to a more simple 3 stars system, to a more complex 5 stars, dual colored system, to relabel "Perfect" as "Excellent" and even to completely get rid of the ratings system altogether, but every one of these attempts hit some roadblock or concern that prevented the proposal to go forward. If you dig in the revision history of the related templates on the wiki, you probably can find some of these discussions.

If you disregard the ratings system, it's sane to assume every single game from the GameCube and Wii library will at least boot on Dolphin nowadays...

(08-15-2020, 09:21 AM)rubens70 Wrote: [ -> ]That being said, are there any major improvements to be made for this emulator or is it now just a case of fine tuning what we already have? I'm ignoring all the android porting, since I use the pc for the majority of my emulation.

From a strict emulation standpoint, it is mostly fine-tuning. One of the other devs may be able to give a more in-depth answer but I believe the biggest change left is that our GPU timings are not very accurate. The other thing, to a much lesser degree, is Gameboy Advance player / games that require link cable integration.

But outside of emulation, there is much we could do. Each developer will have their own goals or ideas but here's some of the big changes I want to see:

* Overhaul the UI to make it more modern or at least touch it up in places
* Add a proper mod system. Many of the modern emulators have this. It would make applying translations and other game specific hacks easier.
* Find a solution to the excessive bloom issue that many Wii games experience at higher resolutions
* Add SPIR-V shader compilation for even faster shader compilation (again used in more modern emulators)
* VR support, AR support, etc